SockPuppetGate redux

By admin

Created 01/31/2007 - 9:54am

By Steven T. Jones
SFist has a nice wrap-up[1] on the fallout from its outing of Newsom flack Peter Ragone as a liar, but the Chron's Matier & Ross[2] not only buried the story halfway through today's column, they also missed the point. Ragone didn't just get his "hand caught in the cookie jar" by pretending to be someone he's not online -- he appeared to have told journalists and the public direct and bald-faced lies to cover up what he did, a sin for which he still hasn't come clean.
That was the focus of the resolution Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin proposed during yesterday's meeting, which calls for all public information officers on the city's payroll to abide by ethical standards accepted by the public relations industry, including honesty. After all, these people work for us. We pay their salaries, not Gavin Newsom, and we don't pay them to subvert the public interest in honest, open government. Kudos to Peskin for trying to take the high road on this sordid incident.